Whenever I move houses – and I do so very frequently for professional reasons – I strive to turn my new place into a real home, my home, as quickly as I can. Last time around I set a new record: I finished the whole thing in just two days of intensive laboring – except for the last five percent. It’s the last boxes that don’t get unpacked. The one or two lamps that don’t get put up. The shoe cabinet that never gets assembled. I don’t know why. I always end up not finishing the last five percent.
Tag: loss
Reason, season, lifetime
I haven’t updated my blog in a while. Not because there was nothing to blog about but because there was so much happening, I simply couldn’t muster the energy to put myself out here. I also felt I shouldn’t share too many details of my career transition, out of loyalty to my current employer. Suffice to say for the moment that I have started doing what needs to be done. In the meantime I’d like to linger on a topic that has moved me for some time and today is an especially good day to write about it: why people come and go.
What they don’t teach at school
I’ve always been a good student. Straight A’s a lot of the time. For whatever reason I cannot fathom, school stuff just came easily to me. Some people thought I was a geek. In fact, I hardly studied. I just soaked it up. One reason might have been that reading was a welcome distraction from the worries of my childhood and youth. Books opened up a whole universe of alternatives. They taught me a lot of stuff. But they didn’t teach me the most important thing of all: how to live.
There is a crack in everything
For a very long time I’ve been carrying around the heavy weight of my past, a story of childhood hurts that I kept telling myself over and over again until it defined me. My dented trust in life’s innate beauty, my need to control and improve whatever and whoever was around me, my lack of playfulness, as it turns out, were once needed ways to ring-fence my vulnerable core from the heavy storms of life. I had become resilient, or at least I thought so.
Do what scares you most
Two years ago I saw my dad – for the first time in 29 years. Our paths had separated when I was nine years old and my parents got a divorce. It was a sudden end to the life I had known. Before I realized my dad was gone. My mom, my siblings and I moved away to live with our new stepfather. I never heard from my dad again. It took me 29 years to find the courage to write to him.
my one life. today 